Time & Perspective Quote by John Hume

There is something almost deliberately unglamorous about Hume’s answer: he refuses the neat origin story. Asked, presumably, about what shaped his thinking, he won’t play the politician’s favorite game of naming a few prestige titles and turning them into a personal brand. “That’s not a question that one can answer accurately” is a quiet rebuke to the culture of tidy influences. It’s also a claim to seriousness. He’s signaling that political judgment isn’t a single epiphany; it’s sediment, built up over time through exposure, argument, and revision.

The repetition does the work. “A whole range… quite a lot… still do… very widely.” It’s rhythmic, almost defensive, as if he’s pushing back against the expectation that a statesman’s mind should be traceable like a family tree. The subtext is credibility: Hume’s authority doesn’t come from ideology or tribal inheritance, but from intellectual breadth. In Northern Ireland’s sectarian ecosystem, that matters. Reading “a lot of history” isn’t a hobby detail; it’s a political instrument, a way to understand how narratives harden into identities and how grievances get laundered into destiny.

He also sneaks in a model of leadership that’s unfashionable today: humility as a method. “I think” and “accurately” keep the ego small and the standard of evidence high. For a figure associated with painstaking compromise, the line is practically a mission statement. Wide reading becomes shorthand for wide sympathy: the ability to imagine opponents as products of contexts, not just obstacles to be outmaneuvered.